Operation Overflight

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On May 1, 1960—the traditional May Day holiday—an American U-2 spyplane flew high above the Soviet Union photographing strategic targets. It was the twenty-fourth U-2 mission over the USSR since the first overflight almost four years earlier. The pilot of this U-2 was thirty-year-old Francis Gary Powers. A former U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, Powers was the most experienced U-2 pilot in the spyplane program with about six hundred hours at the controls of a U-2. He was also one of the most respected spyplane pilots, for his airmanship and for his integrity.

The calm sky more than seventy thousand feet above the USSR, far above the altitude of any Soviet fighter, was suddenly ripped apart as a surface-to-air missile detonated near Powers’s aircraft. Heavily damaged, the plane fell out of control. Unable to use his ejection seat, with great difficulty Powers bailed out of the crippled aircraft as it spun toward earth. He landed safely and was soon captured and flown to Moscow.

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